THE PERMANENT MUTATION — ESTEFANÍA VALLS URQUIJO
Javier Payeras
“A story born from two surnames… I grew up belonging to many places and at the same time to none…” Estefanía Valls Urquijo answers me with a very luminous, very singular look. I have barely begun the interview when an airplane breaks—like obsidian—the silence filled with the tonalities imposed by the small birds that visit her home in Guatemala City. “One always needs pillars to lean on,” she says (and pauses, as if searching for the exact image). “One needs to have one’s feet on the ground… on some kind of ground.” I listen to her and sense in her voice a struggle of ideas in permanent mutation.
My occupation is to write literature about art, which may explain why my impulse is to observe the lives of artists as mysteries: people captured by wonder or by anguish. I have never written a single line about a creator who doesn’t interest me—perhaps because, upon entering their studios, I manage to cross the threshold of their deepest thoughts and answer some of the many questions that outline the horizon of imagination. So I clear my mind so that my senses can grasp what I am visiting in that moment. Estefanía has the natural kindness of a child who observes yellow flowers and draws one for us to take home. “Life is as heavy or as light as we choose to live it,” she says when I ask her about her work with people deprived of liberty—using this euphemism to avoid saying prisoner. I feel her passion for the subject. She tells me that art is not complete if it does not become involved in the life and suffering of people. Isn’t there a pain that is always a kind of prison? In just minutes she unravels her experience, bringing a measure of peace and meditation capable of softening hatred and despair. And so, gradually, our conversation thickens.
Before sitting at the table in her garden, I wandered through her studio and saw a series of suspended stones, brick ovals one can sit on, vessels of clean and meticulously crafted ceramic, spiral altars, the broken gaze of a row of jointed dolls, plaques of poems she spreads on the table, and an infinity of things difficult to describe. I must confess that the first thing I felt was deep admiration for so much accumulated work and so many miles traveled around the world in search of answers. Though I am a constant traveler, my experience has never taken me beyond cities and airports. Estefanía has eaten in the humblest markets of Asia, climbed entire hills, formed friendships with artisans from countries with unpronounceable names, and built her own spiritual world: the religion of those who have walked the world too much to have only one answer.
Our communication becomes more immediate. Estefanía is very descriptive in explaining the processes of ceramics—from the moment the hands take the clay to the firing, the carving, the painting, the glazing… Her pedagogical patience with me is generous, and the truth is that it is hard for me to fully grasp all her knowledge. I toss a question into the open air: Is art useless and sacred? She pauses and replies, “The oldest object humanity ever designed was the bowl, because in it one could eat, gather water from rivers, and receive one’s wages… tell me if this handmade object doesn’t condense both the useful and the sacred in art?… The origin of creativity doesn’t really lie in inventing the useless, I think.” That historical thread leads us to writing, which arose from the need to mark the bowls, to create the symbols that initiated language—language as a pact in constant transformation. I ask if she can show me her hands. She opens them, and I can see their lines... I think that in the hands of sculptors resides all the energy they imprint onto the surfaces of the objects they create. When I share this idea with her, Estefanía confirms my intuition and emphasizes that the hands translate ideas into forms, into sinuosities that can elevate any object into a mere representation of the immaterial—what we call soul or spirit.
I review Valls Urquijo’s work in an attempt to decipher this labyrinth of ideas, which seems difficult to approach in a brief text. Curiously, we studied painting at the same school, in the same generation, which lets me better understand her context. Her academic path spans the private and the public, the national and the international. Her enigmatic first exhibition took the gargoyle as an atemporal reference to darkness, it seems to me, and in that early gesture I recognize the signifier she has sought for what would come later. A reflection on hair and mystical narrative begins to unfold thematically: H.air, W.ings, W.ater… until reaching a turning point where ceramics, the sacred, and sculpture converge into a mature body of work. Through utensils she begins leading her work toward ceramics not as ornament, but as condensed force—a raw metaphor that brings her to imitate bones or cultural episodes in which syncretism may surface: a large slab of clay that cracks underfoot, a nest containing the form of an egg suspended by fragile threads, a Naos resembling a labyrinth where brick and clay ovules become a ritual for the eyes. This culminates in pillars that may be her most representative work: the screenshot of her entire spiritual and cultural impulse. It is a piece shaped by a Maya ceremony and vice versa; perhaps in this work she has found the clearest explanation of her practice. These pillars contain a metal rod functioning as a spine and are filled with porcelain rings, culminating in an upright altar—a kind of remembrance, a memory of the places, the many records, the countless things that in this immense world remain inexplicable.
There is so much life around us. I observe the enviable light of her garden and ask her about death… Estefanía returns to her work in Guatemalan prisons. She tells me, “If I have ever felt God, it has been with the people in prison… there lies both light and darkness… the absolute truth etched by pain. In those heavy spaces, there can be light because there is nothing left to search for… death is the doorway where a voice must ask you, what did you do with everything you had in life?… I want to have that answer, Javier.” I grow still before this reflection. I arrive home with a plaque of poems and begin writing this text. So many things remain in my mind—the silence of my studio, work scattered across post-its stuck to a board, fluorescent markers, and my computer waiting for me to add pages to the book I write each day. Guatemala City can contain the entire world; it can be an island, an isthmus, a mountain, a door, a heaven, and a hell. I pause before the blinking light of the blank Word page and begin this text while slowly observing the glow of the screen.
Cerrito del Carmen, February 8, 2023